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2010-01-04

Understanding the Upgrade Process - MJTV2

To continue my experiences and planning for the upgrade to vSphere, here is the next stage.

First and foremost you have to understand what the process is for upgrading your environment. So off I went to the vSphere Upgrade Guide. I highly advise you read this document from start to finish , but to lay it down in short the process is:

You need to understand - what will be affected (and what will not!) in each and every stage of he process.

During the Upgrade - Services provided by the vCenter Server will not be available

DRS

VMotion

Console Access to the VM (unless you go in per host

HA will continue to work

During the host upgrade you will need enough resources on the other members of your cluster to allow for upgrade of each host - without downtime for your VM’s

Datastores - was not relevant in my case.

Virtual machine will need to be powered off and upgraded - which will mean downtime for all the VM’s

You can of course plan to take the whole infrastructure down at the same time (vCenter, ESX hosts, VM’s and all) but I think that is completely not necessary seeing that this can be done in stages with minimal disturbance to you Infrastructure.